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American Boccaccio Association Newsletter, Spring 2012

http://www.ABAonline.us

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“studium fuit alma poesis”

Vol. 39, No. 1 American Boccaccio Association Spring 2012

Officers: Michael Papio, University of Massachusetts Amherst, President

Simone Marchesi, Princeton University, Vice President

Susanna Barsella, Fordham University, Treasurer

Elsa Filosa, Vanderbilt University, Secretary-Newsletter Editor

IN THIS ISSUE:

The New Constitution and Bylaws

Minutes from the Annual Meeting

Report from our Treasurer

News from our Members

Presentation of the index of the Proceedings of the 2010 International Boccaccio Conference

Presentation of Heliotropia 8-9 (2011-12)

Presentation of Studi sul Boccaccio 39 (2011)

Past Conferences

Toward 2013, Boccaccio’s Centenary. What is the ABA organizing?

Friendly Reminders



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NEW CONSTITUTION & BYLAWS

During the month of March, all the members in good standing of the American Boccac-

cio Association were called upon to consider making changes to parts of the Constitution and the Bylaws. The modifications were proposed mainly for two reasons: 1. Proposals intended to reflect (and legitimize) recent practice:

a. Because of the difficulties encountered by scholars residing abroad in sending checks in USD, the 2008 referendum results needed to be officially set into the constitution (point III).

b. What was previously a joint position of Secretary-Treasurer is split into two sepa-rate offices with a clear delineation of the duties of each.

c. The responsibilities of the Nominating Committee needed to be outlined more clearly.

2. Proposals intended to provide for future improvements:

a. Although the move to a digital newsletter saves money on postage, making it readily available online diminishes one of the benefits of membership. For non-members, therefore, the newsletter’s online publication will be delayed for six months. Mem-bers will continue to receive it by email as soon as it is complete.

b. In lieu of simply staggering the terms of office for the members of the Association’s Executive Committee, one office will be contested by two of its members in each election. Consequently, every election ensures a certain amount of continuity and simultaneously introduces a new member into the Executive Committee.

c. The annual meeting of the ABA will be moved from the MLA (where costs are high and medievalists not particularly abundant) to Kalamazoo.

d. The members of the Executive Committee are directed to archive and collect docu-ments related to Association business in a way that will facilitate the future administration of the ABA.

In the following pages, we present a table that reflects each difference in the 2008 version and in the version for 2012, which, having been approved, is the new Constitution and By-laws of the Association.

We would like also to thank sincerely all the members who helped us in the process by making suggestions for the improvement of the revision process and giving advice for the disambiguation of the newest version of the constitution and bylaws.



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CONSTITUTION AND BYLAWS OF

THE AMERICAN BOCCACCIO ASSOCIATION Approved, March 2012

CONSTITUTION

I. The name of this association shall be: THE AMERICAN BOCCACCIO ASSOCIATION II. Purpose. The purposes of the Association shall be: the encouragement of Boccaccio

studies among American scholars, regardless of their particular disciplines; the establishment of a permanent Boccaccio Studies Center; the hosting of the annual Boccaccio Studies Forum; the publication of a newsletter as a clearing-house of information and communication for Boccaccisti; the sponsoring of a journal of Boccaccio scholarship, consisting of studies, abstracts and reviews.

III. Membership. Any person may become a member of the Association by payment of

the dues determined by the Executive Committee. Charter members are those who joined the Association within the first year since its inception, that is, before April 10, 1975. Honorary members may be elected from among non-resident foreign scholars and benefactors of the Association by the Executive Committee. In accord-ance with the result of the Association’s 2008 referendum on foreign scholars’ dues, members who reside outside of the United States are not required to pay dues.



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IV. Organization. Under the Provisional Constitution of the Association, the governing body shall be the Executive Committee, consisting of a President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer.

V. Officers: Election, Term of Office, Duties.

1. The President of the Association shall be elected by the general membership from a slate of candidates prepared by a nominating Committee of three members, for a term of office of three years. The President will preside at all meetings of the Executive Committee and of the General Membership.

2. The Vice President shall be elected in the same manner as the President and

will also serve for three years. In the absence of the President the Vice Presi-dent will assume the President’s duties.

3. The Secretary is elected for a term of three years. The Secretary shall act as

secretary of the Executive committee and of the General Membership meet-ings and shall be the editor of the Association newsletter. Editorial and cleri-cal assistance shall be provided to the secretary at the discretion of the Executive Committee and under its supervision.

4. The Treasurer is elected for a term of three years. The Treasurer will handle

all business arrangements, including the collection of dues and the budgeting of Association expenses.

5. In order to ensure the continuity of the Association and to foster the

participation of its members, the Nominating Committee will ensure that at least one office in the Executive Committee be contested in every election by two current members of the Executive Committee.

6. When an elected official leaves office before the expiration of the term of of-

fice, the Executive Committee shall provide a replacement for the duration of the term.

7. Nomination to honorary positions is made at the discretion of the Executive

Committee and should be submitted to the general membership for approval. Such nomination should be made rarely and only of scholars of outstanding achievement.

VI. Committees. A Nominating Committee of three members shall be elected from the

general membership. The membership shall propose a slate of candidates to be elected to the Nominating Committee via electronic polling. The general member-ship shall then elect from that slate the three-member Nominating Committee who



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shall subsequently elect their own chair and determine their own organization. The Nominating Committee shall solicit nominations from current members for the elected offices, ensure the willingness of each candidate to serve and present to the general membership for a vote a slate of two candidates for each office.

VII. Dues. The payment of dues entitles members to all of the rights and privileges of

membership and immediate access to the newsletter. Members in good standing may vote, serve on committees, contribute to the newsletter and other publications and participate in the formation of policy.

VIII. Meetings. The Association’s annual meeting will be held in conjunction with the an-

nual meeting of the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. An organizational meeting of the Executive Committee shall be held at least one month prior, whether in person or by conference call.

IX. Amendments to and revisions of the Association’s by-laws and constitution may be

submitted to the Executive Committee by any member in good standing. All changes must be approved by a two-thirds majority of the general membership in order to be ratified.

BYLAWS

1. Membership Lists. Copies of the membership lists, updated after the general membership meeting each year, will be given to the members of the Executive committee. No one may use the membership lists, except for the normal uses of the Association, without express permission from a majority of the Executive Commit-tee.

2. Filing of records and documents. Originals of Association documents and records

are to be kept by the Secretary. The Treasurer is responsible for all financial records and related documents. Digital archiving shall be the preferred means of preserva-tion of such documents.

3. All communication issuing from and directed to the Association shall take place via

electronic means. The Association’s contact e-mail address shall be that of the Secre-tary.



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MINUTES OF THE ANNUAL MEETING, 2012

The annual meeting of the American Boccaccio Association was called to order at 5:20pm on Saturday, May 12, 2012, in Fetzer 2030 of Western Michigan Univer-sity during the 47th International Con-gress on Medieval Studies, held in Kalamazoo, MI, with President Michael Papio presiding. Having been scheduled at the same time as the business meeting of the Italians and Italianists at Kalama-zoo, the ABA meeting enjoyed a smaller than usual public.

First on the agenda was an explanation of the ABA’s mission, its current budget, its plans for supporting and promoting the study of Boccaccio in the United States and the Association’s intention to become an affiliated organization of the Renais-sance Society of America. We then passed to a review of the past year’s activities, in-cluding the approval of the new constitu-tion and bylaws, the titles of the sessions

sponsored by the ABA over the previous twelve months and the participation of the Association in last June’s international seminar, entitled “Boccaccio 2013: Verso il settimo centenario” and hosted by the Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccaccio.

The remainder of the meeting focused on the ABA’s involvement in upcoming conferences, including the MLA Conven-tion, the RSA Conference, Binghamton University’s “Boccaccio at 700,” the 48th ICMS in Kalamazoo, Wake Forest Univer-sity’s “Boccaccio veneto” to be held in Venice, the University of Bologna’s “Boccaccio politico” and, last but not least, the ABA’s 2013 International Boccaccio Conference to be held at Georgetown Uni-versity.

The meeting rounded out with a discussion of future panels (and strate-gies for obtaining them) at Kalamazoo.

REPORT FROM OUR TREASURER

This year the ABA committed to sponsoring one keynote speaker at Binghamton Univer-sity’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ conference, Boccaccio at 700. After this expenditure, the ABA had $4,649.47 left in its account.



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NEWS FROM OUR MEMBERS

We congratulate our members Beatrice Arduini, who accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Elsa Filosa, who become Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University. Igor Candido is currently working on his monograph on Boccaccio as reader, glossator and imitator of Apuleius of Madauros, which is tentatively entitled Eros, Psiche e il mito classico nel ’300. Studi su Boccaccio e Apuleio and will be pub-lished by Longo Editore in January 2013. Roberta Morosini has three forthcoming essays: “‘E lavorando semini ciascuno’: An Interdisciplinary reading of Decameron III, 4.” In Festschrift: Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, L. Waldman and M. Israels, eds. Florence: Olschki, forth-coming; “L’arcangelo Michele ‘messo ce-leste’ nel De Maumeth propheta Saraceno-rum. Boccaccio ‘riscrittore’ della Satirica ystoria di Paolino Veneto e ‘lettore’ delle Expositiones di Guido da Pisa nello Zibal-done Magliabechiano, Studi sul Boccaccio 40 (2012), forthcoming; “Boccaccio and Christian-Muslim Relations.” In Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical His-tory, 1200-1350, J. Tolan and A. Mallett eds. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. David Lummus has two articles accepted

for publication: “Boccaccio’s Poetic Anthropology: Allegories of History in the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri.” Specu-lum 87.3 (July 2012); “Boccaccio’s Hellen-ism and the Foundations of Modernity.” Mediaevalia 33 (2012). Since the publications of our members abroad are not included in the North America Boccaccio Bibliography, we take this opportunity to announce them here. K. P. Clarke published: Chaucer and Ital-ian Textuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); “Chaucer and Italy: Contexts and/of Sources,” Literature Compass 8/8 (2011): 526-533; and he as forthcoming: “A Good Place for a Tale: Reading the Decameron in 1358-1363,” MLN 128 (Jan 2012) and “Marrying Word and Image: Visualizing Boccaccio’s Decameron at the Spannocchi Wedding, Siena, 1494,” Studi sul Boccaccio 40 (2012). Enrico Costa published and won the Luigi Malafarina Prize for his book Itinerari Mediterranei. Simboli e immaginario, fra mari isole e porti, città e paesaggi, ebrei cristiani e musulmani nel Decameron di Giovanni Boccaccio. Reggio Calabria: Città del sole, 2011.



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PRESENTATION OF THE INDEX OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2010 INTERNATIONAL BOCCACCIO CONFERENCE

It is with pleasure that we announce the publication of the Proceedings of the 2010 International Boccaccio Conference held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the aegis of the American Boccaccio Association: Boccaccio in America. Elsa Filosa and Michael Papio, eds. Ravenna: Longo, 2012.

Premessa

Introduzione

Breve storia dell’American Boccaccio Association

Prima newsletter dell’ABA

Boccaccio e i sensi: gusto, udito e olfatto

Victoria Kirkham, “The Cook’s Decameron, or, Boccaccio to the Res-cue of the Dull British Diet”

Francesco Ciabattoni, “Musica sacra e musica profana nel Decame-ron”

Christopher Kleinhenz, “A Nose for Style: Olfactory Sensitivity in Dante and Boccaccio”

Boccaccio e Dante

Beatrice Arduini, “Il ruolo di Boccaccio e di Marsilio Ficino nella tradizione del Convivio di Dante”

Jelena Todorović, “Nota sulla Vita Nova di Giovanni Boccaccio”

Todd Boli, “Boccaccio’s Biography, Dante’s Biography, and How They Intersected”

Boccaccio e la filosofia

Michael Papio, “Boccaccio: Mythographer, Philosopher, Theolo-gian”

Susanna Barsella, “I marginalia di Boccaccio sull’Etica Nicomachea di Aristotele (Biblioteca Ambrosiana A 204 inf.)”

Filippo Andrei, “The Variants of the Honestum: Practical Philosophy in the Decameron”

Boccaccio e il Decameron

Renzo Bragantini, “L’ordine dei racconti e il libro: variazioni e corrispondenze nel Decameron”

Marilyn Migiel, “Some Restrictions Apply: Testing the Reader in Decameron III.8”

Laurie Shepard, “Guido Cavalcanti among the Tombstones”

Boccaccio e la tradizione letteraria

Igor Candido, “‘Venus duplex’: Apuleio dal Teseida alla Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine”

Giuseppe Velli, “Giovanni Boccaccio, Centonatore/Recreator, or on the Free Use of the Written Word”

Roberto Fedi, “Agnizioni di lettura (Decameron VII.5): da Boccaccio a Verga”

Appendice

Programma della conferenza: “2010 International Boccaccio Conference”

Nota sugli autori

Bibliografia



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PRESENTATION OF HELIOTROPIA 8-9, 2011-12 http://www.heliotropia.org

Studies:

Natalie Cleaver. “Phaethon’s Old Age in the Genealogie and the Decameron” (pp. 1-16)

Elisabetta Menetti. “La fucina delle finzioni: Le novelle e le origini del romanzo” (pp. 17-34)

Maggie Fritz-Morkin. “Andreuccio at the Well: Sanitation Infrastructure and Civic Values in Decameron II.5” (pp. 35-49)

Kristina Olson. “The Language of Women as Written by Men: Boccaccio, Dante and Gendered Histories of the Vernacular” (pp. 51-78)

Giovanni Spani. “Il vino di Boccaccio: Usi e abusi in alcune novelle del Decameron” (pp. 79-98)

Marco Veglia. “Messer Decameron Galeotto. Un titolo e una chiave di lettura” (pp. 99-112)

Reviews:

Giovanni Boccaccio. La novella di Ser Cepparello. Decameron, I 1. Revisione filologica, introduzione e note di Alfonso D’Agostino. Milano: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, 2010. Reviewed by Martina Mazzetti. (pp. 113-19)

Marco Cerocchi. Funzioni semantiche e metatestuali della musica in Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio. Firenze: Olschki, 2010. Reviewed by Fabian Alfie. (pp. 120-21)

Certaldo. Poesia del Medioevo. Alla scoperta delle chiese, delle torri, dei palazzi nel paese di Giovanni Boccaccio. Francesca Allegri and Massimo Tosi, eds. Robert Hollander, Intro. Certaldo: Federighi Colorgrafiche, 2002. Reviewed by Victoria Kirkham. (pp. 122-25)

La corrispondenza bucolica tra Giovanni Boccaccio e Checco di Meletto Rossi. L’egloga di Giovanni del Virgilio ad Albertino Mussato. Crit. ed. with commentary and introduction by Simona Lorenzini. Firenze: Olschki, 2011. Reviewed by Michael Papio. (pp. 126-30)

Rhiannon Daniels. Boccaccio and the Book. Production and Reading in Italy 1340-1520. Oxford: Legenda, 2009. Reviewed by Beatrice Arduini. (pp. 131-34)

Please note that next year marks not only Boccaccio’s 700th birthday but also the ten-

year anniversary of Heliotropia, the only journal of Boccaccio Studies in the United States. We are already accepting submissions for the 2013 special number and invite collaboration from the ABA’s members. On the site’s home page you will find a list of books currently available for review and more volumes are on their way. Please send questions and comments to Michael Papio ([email protected]).



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PRESENTATION OF STUDI SUL BOCCACCIO 39, 2011 (by Igor Candido)

The American Boccaccio Association was kindly invited by the Ente Nazionale Giovanni Boccac-cio to participate in the presentation of vol. 39 of Studi sul Bocccaccio. Our member abroad Igor Candido attended as the Association’s representative, and he sent back the following report.

On March 14, 2012, in the beautiful set-ting of the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Flo-rence, Guglielmo Bartoletti (Biblioteca Marucelliana), Francesco Bruni (Univer-sità Ca’ Foscari di Venezia), Carlo Del-corno (Università di Bologna), and Ste-fano Zamponi (Università di Firenze) pre-sented volume 39 of Studi sul Boccaccio. In my brief account of the event, I will mainly concentrate on the scholarly contributions of Delcorno and Bruni, which respectively reflect the two parts into which the volume is divided. The first part collects the proceedings of the conference “Verso il VII centenario. Mo-delli medievali, riscritture e interpreta-zione del Boccaccio volgare” (Bologna, November 19-20, 2010), and the second hosts four other studies, written by Rob-ert Hollander, Laura Banella, Maddalena Signorini, and Maria Gozzi.

Delcorno moves programmatically from Silvia Contarini’s Un dialogo epistolare sul Boccaccio: Jolle, Huizinga e il “problema del Rinascimento”, which investigates the ex-tant epistolary exchange between Jolle and Huizinga and demonstrates the influence of Boccaccio’s Decameron on Jolle’s idea of the Renaissance and his conception of real-ism. According to Jolle, it is in the tale fea-turing the figure of the natural philosopher Guido Cavalcanti (VI.9) that Boccaccio im-plicitly posits the historical question of what the Renaissance is. In Giorgio Forni’s Dante e la struttura del ‘Decameron,’ Delcorno singles out the idea of Boccac-cio’s correcting Dante with Dante, a notion that corresponds to what Robert Hol-lander aptly defined as Boccaccio’s “imita-tive distance” from the author of the Commedia. In such a way, the tale of Ber-gamino and Cangrande (I.7) would aim to overturn and parody Dante’s Epistle to



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Cangrande, just as the tale of ser Ciappel-letto does with the characters of Ulysses and Manfredi in the Commedia. Giuseppe Ledda’s Retoriche dell’ineffabile da Dante a Boccaccio offers another contribution to the relationship that strongly ties Boccac-cio to Dante. Like Dante, Boccaccio, particularly in his Amorosa visione, uses invocations to resort to divine help and so to overcome the limits of ineffability itself. Delcorno then touches upon Claudia Seba-stiani Nobili’s “Tu non pensavi ch’io loico fossi”: Boccaccio e l’eredità della scolastica. Here, love is acknowledged as the most prominent figure in the Filocolo and in the novel’s fourth book: the so-called Questioni d’amore would allude to both the Scholas-tic quaestiones and Gentile da Cingoli’s thirteen quaestiones. With Nicolò Mal-dina’s Retoriche e modelli della predica-zione medievale nel “Corbaccio” we move from the first of Boccaccio’s prose narra-tives to the last: according to Maldina, the doctrine of penitence suggests the general scheme for the dialogue, whereas satisfac-tio would correspond to Boccaccio’s act of writing the Corbaccio. Delcorno lastly com-ments on Maria Gozzi’s Riflessioni sull’ottava, which aims to reopen the vex-ata quaestio of the origins of ottava rima by bringing new evidence to Aurelio Roncaglia’s traditional thesis against Gorni’s.

In Bruni’s view, Studi sul Boccaccio has been able to renew itself over the years, aptly interpreting the crucial need for the humanities to open themselves to moder-nity without imposing our modern ap-proaches and problems upon the past. As an important part of this renovation, Vit-tore Branca and his school worked to en-courage and enhance the dialogue be-tween the two most active traditions of

Italian studies, the Italian and the Ameri-can. Most of Bruni’s presentation is then devoted to commenting on Hollander’s The Struggle for Control among the Novellatori of the “Decameron” and the Reason for Their Return to Florence. Hol-lander draws a profile of each of the brigata’s ten narrators, shedding new light on the subtle relationships among them and the tales they choose to tell. This investigation includes Boccaccio himself as a narrator. By adding the no-vella delle papere (Intr. to Day IV) he writes more than one hundred stories, thus departing from Dante, his great in-ventive model. Bruni does not agree with Hollander on this point, as the story is deliberately left without conclusion and is explicitly isolated from the others: “it pleaseth me, in my own defence, to relate, non an entire story, – lest it should seem I would fain mingle mine own stories with those of so commendable a company... – but a part of one, – that so its very default [of completeness] may attest that it is none of those.” It is nonetheless possible that even this incompleteness could be considered part of Boccaccio’s “imitative distance” from Dante, or, as Bruni puts it, of his “gioco con Dante del sì e del no.” Zamponi focuses on Maddalena Signo-rini’s Considerazioni preliminari sulla biblioteca di Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccac-cio bequeathed to the library of Santo Spirito a number of manuscripts that is almost double that of Petrarch, and he had access to Latin authors still unknown to Petrarch himself: Terence, Ovid, Mar-tial and Juvenal. Last but not least, Boccaccio’s Aristotle, Signorini argues, might come from the libreria maior of Santo Spirito.



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PAST CONFERENCES

Two sessions on Boccaccio were held at the 2012 MLA in Seattle (January 5-8), one organized by the American Boccaccio Association and the other by the Comparative Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Literature organization.

ABA’s open session, entitled simply Boccaccio, was held on Saturday, January 7. The session, chaired by Elsa Filosa, was composed as follows:

1. Valerio Ferme (U of Colorado), “Queen for One Day: Pampinea’s Unreliable Leader-ship in Boccaccio’s Decameron”

2. Thomas Klinkert (U of Freiburg im Breis-gau, Germany), “The Problematic Rela-tionship between Narrative Fiction and Knowledge in Boccaccio’s Decameron”

3. David Lummus (Yale U), “Boccaccio vs. Petrarca: Friendship, Greed, and the Civic Responsibility of Poetry”

The second session, entitled Boccaccio’s legacies, was held on Sunday, January 8. The session, chaired by Ignacio Navarrete, was composed as follows:

1. Martin Eisner, (Duke U), “Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature”

2. Filippo Andrei, (UC Berkeley), “The ‘Celes-tina’ and the Elegiac Legacy of Madonna Fiammetta”

3. Kavita Mudan, (Georgetown U), “Exem-plary Historiography: Margaret of Anjou as ‘De Casibus’ Heroines”

The Renaissance Society of America Conference was held in Washington, DC, on

March 22-24, 2012. Two sessions were of interest to Boccaccio scholars. The first was “Crossing Boundaries: Translation, Betrayal, and Literary Seduction from Boccaccio to Tasso,” scheduled for Thursday, March 22, from 1:15 to 2:45 am, organized for the Ameri-can Boccaccio Association by Susanna Barsella (Fordham U) and Elsa Filosa (Vanderbilt U) and chaired by Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale U). We present here the papers and their ab-stracts:

1. James Kriesel (U of Notre Dame), “Boccaccio, the Italian Ovid” Boccaccio has been called the “Italian Ovid.” Scholars have typically assumed that in the Decameron

Boccaccio alluded to Ovid for ethical reasons: he wanted to help women (Ars) or correct lovers’ vices (Remedium). Still, the poetic and generic reasons behind the Certaldese’s allusions to Ovid have not been fully appreciated. Boccaccio’s Ovidian allusions were designed to associate the Decameron’s short stories with a canonical genre: erotic elegy. In categorizing the Decameron as an elegy, Boccac-cio suggested that he exploited the corporeal and erotic for purposes of representation. Boccaccio thereby claimed that his poetics were similar to God’s: as elegiac poets use the corporeal to embody truth, so the Word was made flesh. Due to the Decameron’s elegiac poetics, Boccaccio claimed to represent truth more effectively than Dante. For this paper, I shall discuss the manner and purpose of Boccaccio’s references to Ovid’s writings in the Decameron’s title, Proemio and introduction.

2. Francesco Ciabattoni (Georgetown U), “Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Codex Rossi 215” This paper explores the musical references in Boccaccio’s Decameron and proposes to interpret them

as a secular response to the panegyric of sacred music found in Dante’s Comedy. Furthermore, and contrary to Boccaccio scholarship so far, this paper shows how the Decameron’s ballads should be compared to the music collected in the Codex Rossi 215 rather than to that of the Squarcialupi Codex.

3. Igor Candido (Johns Hopkins U), “Fabula aut Historia: Boccaccio’s Gen. XIV, 9 and Petrarch’s Sen. XVII,



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3-4” In early 1373 Boccaccio presented Petrarch with a copy of his Decameron, to which Petrarch would

later admit to have devoted only cursory attention. He nonetheless dwelt long on the Centonovelle’s very last tale, the story of Griselda, finally translating it into Latin. The reasons behind such a surpris-ing choice are to be found in two of his Senili (XVII, 3-4), which form, together with the attached Latin Griselda, a prehumanistic treatise entitled De insigni obedientia et fide uxoria. But Petrarch’s text is a radical rewriting of the source tale rather than a faithful translation, as it turns its fabula into an exemplum that the good Christian should follow in order to achieve moral perfection. Did Petrarch’s predilection for historical verisimilitude misunderstand and so distort Boccaccio’s concept of fabula? What idea did he entertain of the “Griselda fable,” the very apex of Boccaccio’s masterpiece?

4. Simone Marchesi (Princeton University), “Boccaccio’s Latin Dante: Exporting the Divine Comedy in the De Casibus”

Between the mid-1350s and 1373 Boccaccio undertook the writing of a vast historical encyclopedia hinging on the constant presence of Fortune in human life. As befitting an encyclopedic text, the work relies on a vast array of sources, mostly Latin, from which Boccaccio draws language and rhetorical structures. One remarkable, if seldom detected, traceable influence on Boccaccio’s diction is that of Dante who is present, in particular and perhaps surprisingly, as the vernacular author of the Divine Comedy. My paper investigates the allusion to several of Dante’s memorable lines embedded in Boccaccio’s text as integral to his sententious style – a classical as much as medieval rhetorical fea-ture activated in the De Casibus – and as functional to his strategic advocating of Dante’s authority as a paradoxically vernacular classic with the Latin and Petrarch-dominated humanist circles in the se-cond half of the Italian Trecento.

Another very interesting session on Boccaccio was the one organized by Victoria Kirkham and chaired by Janet Smarr, entitled “In Honor of Boccaccio’s 700th Birthday: New Perspectives.”

1. Roberto Fedi (U per Stranieri di Perugia), “A New Reading of Boccaccio’s Rime” Boccaccio’s Rime are among his least studied works, due as much to difficult textual issues as the dominant presence of his near-contemporary Petrarch. Boccaccio didn’t compose his lyric poetry in a diaristic or biographical “sequence.” Spanning some forty years, from the early 1330s to his death, his rhymes reflect the practice of his day, with an internal evolution free from philosophical or doctrinal considerations. Boccaccio stands midway, both historically and conceptually, between Dante and Pet-rarch. This talk analyzes selected poems based on a new ordering that attempts to describe a stylistic rather than a biographical evolution. Order is tied neither to a chronological unifying line or a fic-tional story (as in Petrarch’s lyrics), but emerges as largely experimental. This feature of the Rime determines their importance in the lyric tradition and in Boccaccio’s literary corpus.

2. Todd Boli (Independent Scholar), “Personality and Conflict in Boccaccio’s Epistles” Unlike Petrarch, Boccaccio never made a collection of his epistles, and his letters present many gaps. Nevertheless, certain themes from Boccaccio’s biography, in particular his casual opportunism, his extreme sensitivity to personal slights, and his attachment to the libertà of the Florentine republic, lend his epistles a certain cohesion and underscore aspects of his life that might otherwise be less evident. The letters document, for example, a number of Boccaccio’s clashes with the powerful representative of the Neapolitan royal court, Niccolò Acciaiuoli. Although temperamentally better suited for employment by Florence’s democratic government, Boccaccio yearned for precisely the stable and easy employment that Petrarch enjoyed by accepting the patronage of tyrants and popes. His letters reveal how the two writers were often set at odds by Petrarch’s cautious reluctance to be of assistance to Boccaccio and Boccaccio’s fear of compromising his liberty by agreeing to spend time with his friend.

3. Victoria Kirkham (U of Pennsylvania), “Boccaccio as Artist: A Visual Legacy” Singular among the Three Crowns of Florence for the monumental corpus of images inspired by his works, Boccaccio is also unique among Italy’s classic poets for his own activity as artist. His fascina-tion with the visual arts, evident in literary tributes to Giotto, lives of artists in De mulieribus claris,



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and the altarpiece he commissioned for his tomb, finds expression in a body of autograph drawings dating from ca. 1340 to his last years. Remarkably varied – doodles in his oldest notebooks, a dedica-tion scene for his Teseida, a self-portrait attached to Buccolicum carmen, beautiful family “trees” of the gods in De genealogie deorum, catchwords for his last copy of the collected tales, full-scale illustrations for Dante’s Inferno and an early Decameron – they reflect a talented amateur whose pen as artist parallels in witty spirit the quill he wielded with words, bearing out the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis.

Other papers on Boccaccio at the RSA Convention included:

1. Pier Massimo Forni (Johns Hopkins U) presented “Sprezzatura in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” in the ses-sion “Shaping Civility in Early Modern Italian Culture I,” organized by Andrea Baldi (Rutgers U) and chaired by Monica Calabritto (CUNY, Hunter C). The notion of sprezzatura is at the core of Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. The Lombard intellectual gave this category of the soul the name with which it would continue to go by. However, other writers in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance showed a fascination with the kinds of behaviors that we are now used to identifying with the label sprezzatura. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is perhaps the classic of early Italian literature that more than any other features sprezza-tura at work, embodied both by the narrators in the frame-tale and the protagonists of the tales. This paper argues that sprezzatura has not received all the attention it deserves within comprehensive critical assessments of Boccaccio’s work and offers a few suggestions to fill the lacuna.

2. Ignacio Navarrete (UC Berkeley) presented “Cervantes, Boccaccio and Verisimilitude” in the session “Spanish Letters and Representation,” organized by Ann E. Moyer (U of Pennsylvania) and chaired by Adam G. Beaver (Princeton U). The priest who reads “El curioso impertinente” aloud comments that it lacks verisimilitude because no man would risk encouraging the seduction of his own wife. This judgment, although in the lan-guage of neo-Aristotelian theory of epic and romance, transforms verisimilitude away from issues of marvelous intervention, and towards psychological acuity. The pronouncement is further motivated by the nature of the story, an Italian novella with generic roots in the Decameron. The Italianism of the “Curioso” includes geographical location, social environment, and plot, an erotic beffa that mis-fires. Its workings thus depend on psychological verisimilitude: through the priest’s comment, Cervantes offers a reading that privileges acuity over invention, and contemporary bourgeois environment over an antique, exotic, or courtly milieu. Implicitly locating Boccaccio at the head of the modern novel tradition, Cervantes sacrifices the actual variety of the Decameron. Cervantes’s story and critique together constitute a foundational statement of the new genre.

3. Peter Roland Schwertsik (Ludwig Maximilians U München) presented “Traces of the Lost Collectiones of Paolo da Perugia? Boccaccio, Theodontius, MS V.F. 21 in Naples,” in the session “Neo-Latin Intertextuality IV,” organized and chaired by Philip Ford (Cambridge U). Miscellaneous codex V F 21 in the National Library, Naples, from the late fourteenth century, contains a neglected mythological compendium of myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The same codex also dis-plays a commentary on Horace’s Ars poetica ascribed to Paolo da Perugia, one of Boccaccio’s main sources in the Genealogia deorum gentilium. I propose to show that many of the myths in V F 21 correspond to those attributed by Boccaccio to the lost Collectiones of Paolo da Perugia, to the omi-nous figure of Theodontius, and to an unspecified “Ovidius.” By comparison with a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Munich (clm 4610), the so-called Digby mythographer in Oxford (cod. Digby 221), and several genealogies of gods published by Teresa Hankey, I will come to the conclusion that Naples V F 21 is an important tessera in the stony path to gaining an idea of the lost “Theodontius.”



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The annual conference of the American Association for Italian Studies (which took place in Charleston, South Carolina on May 3-5) hosted the following four sessions dedi-cated to Boccaccio:

“The Many Faces of Naples.” Organizer and Chair: Patrizia La Trecchia (U of South Florida) 1. Grazia Menechella (U of Wisconsin-Madison), “‘Il rumore sottile della prosa’: intrecci di luoghi,

storie e voci in Sandokan. Storia di camorra di Nanni Balestrini” 2. Roberta Morosini (Wake Forest U), “La ‘bona sonoritas’ di Calliopo: Boccaccio a Napoli, la

polifonia di Partenope e i silenzi dell’Acciaiuoli”

“The Decameron’s Lyrical Sequence: Day One through Four.” Organizer and Chair: Dino S. Cervigni (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 1. Michele Sguerri (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Portrait of a Young Woman in Love:

Pampinea’s Song in Decameron 2” 2. Danila Cannamela (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “The Decameron’s Third Ballad: A Hu-

man and Earthly Song of Love” 3. Katie-Nicole Bagarella (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “The Decameron’s Fourth Ballad:

Filostrato’s Song of Love and His Wish for Death”

“The Decameron 5-6-7’s Lyrical Sequence: Are Dioneo, Elissa and Filomena Unhappy Lovers?” Organ-izer: Dino S. Cervigni (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Chair: Michele Sguerri (U of North Caro-lina at Chapel Hill) 1. Brandon Essary (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “‘Mi senti’ gir legando / ogni vertú’: Love

and Virtue in Decameron 5 and Dioneo’s Ballad” 2. Daria Bozzato (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Being in Love, Being at War: Elissa’s Song

in Decameron 6” 3. Kate Greenburg (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “In Love, Unhappy, yet Envied: Filomena

and the Seventh Day’s Ballad”

“The Decameron 8-9-10’s Lyrical Sequence: From Happiness to Jealousy.” Organizer: Dino S. Cervigni (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Chair: Brandon Essary (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 1. April Weintritt (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “The Eighth Ballad of the Decameron:

Terrestrial Love Ignited” 2. Kaitlin Johnson (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Solitary Neifile’s Indirect Song toward

Her Beloved: ‘Deh! vien, ch’i’ non disperi’” 3. Dino S. Cervigni (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “The Eighth Ballad of the Decameron:

Fiammetta’s Final Ballad: ‘S’amor venisse senza gelosia’”



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The 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo took place on May 10-13, during which the ABA held its annual meeting and sponsored one session. The titles and abstracts are presented here:

“Boccaccio and Dante,” organized and chaired by Michael Papio (U of Massachusetts Amherst). 1. Beatrice Arduini (U of Massachusetts Amherst), “Boccaccio’s Second Commedia: the Ricciardiano

1035” Boccaccio’s activities as copyist, editor and illustrator of the Commedia in Riccardiano 1035 reveal him as a literary-historical figure and cultural entrepreneur. Boccaccio’s recodification of Dante’s opus initiates the process of ordering and interpreting of works such as the Vita nova, the Commedia and Dante’s lyric poetry. In particular, Boccaccio’s three autograph copies of the Commedia, along with the collection of Dante’s fifteen canzoni, represent a significant shift in the textual tradition of the poem to which Giorgio Petrocchi refers in the title of his 1966 critical edition – La Commedia se-condo l’antica vulgata. Petrocchi’s Commedia comes from the tradition we call the «vulgata», that is the textual tradition that favored simplified and distorted readings and was established before Boccaccio’s editorial interventions. The Riccardiano, which dates from the 1360s (between the Tole-dano 104.6 and the Vatican Chigiano L. VI. 213), offers some editorial changes to Dante’s works, It contains only the Commedia, with the Raccoglimenti by Boccaccio, and the collection of Dante’s fif-teen “canzoni distese,” with Italian rubrics, in the same order, as in the Toledano and in the Chigiano. The texts of the Commedia and the canzoni are copies of Boccaccio’s previous versions, and the ab-sence of the Vita di Dante is the only substantial difference. Yet, the Riccardiano represents a pivotal moment of the critical and artistic fortune of Dante’s poem in the mid-fourteenth-century Florence. My paper will examine Boccaccio’s illustrations of the Inferno’s first seventeen cantos, an activity that dates back to his autograph copies of the classics, such as his early transcription of Martial’s Epi-grams in ms. C 67 sup., Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana.

2. Johanna Gropper (U of Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg im Breisgau), “Boccaccio’s References to Dante as Markers of Fiction. A New Perspective on Dantean Intertexts in the Decameron” After all that has been said about the Dante-Boccaccio relationship, pointing out Boccaccio’s aware-ness of his great Florentine precursor in the Decameron might be considered a commonplace. How-ever, if various studies during the last thirty years revealed Boccaccio’s enormous debt to Dante in composing his masterpiece, the abounding references to the Commedia in the Decameron have rarely been examined with regard to their poetological implications. This neglect is a fortiori surprising since some of Boccaccio’s most visible allusions to Dante in the Decameron, to begin with the famous cognomen “prencipe Galeotto” in the (sub-)title, are located in highly strategic places, i.e. ‘paratexts’ in Genette’s terminology: Proposing justification and self-conscious reflection on the Decameron, the (sub-)title as well as the “Proemio” and parts of the “Introduzione alla Prima giornata” can indeed be defined as “thresholds” (seuils) between “text and off-text.” This papers starts from this observation and carves out the deeper meaning of Boccaccio’s references to Dante in the paratexts of his Decameron. I suggest that by creating intertextual connections to Dante’s Commedia in the paratexts of his Decameron, Boccaccio reclaims the same ambiguity for his own work and thus affirms its fic-tional status. Seen in this perspective, Boccaccio’s references to Dante appear as markers of fiction, which not only defend the author of the Decameron against his detractors but also constitute a gen-eral apology of autonomous vernacular literature in fourteenth-century Florence, still dominated by Christian preachers trying to subordinate texts in volgare (the exempla created for the edification of the audience) to moral aims.

3. Kristina Olson (George Mason U), “‘Chiosar con altro testo’: the Presence of the Decameron in the Dante Commentary Tradition.” The Esposizioni are an obvious source for commentators of the Commedia throughout the commen-tary tradition, and particularly in the 14th and 15th centuries. The commentaries of Benvenuto da Imola (1375-80), Francesco da Buti (1385-95), and Cristoforo Landino (1481) all directly cite Boccaccio’s commentary as an historical source when providing their own independent glosses of the poem. However, they do not cite only the Esposizioni; they also cite the Decameron and other works



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by Boccaccio. While citations from the Genealogie deorum gentilium or the De montibus might seem appropriate sources for these commentaries, the employment of the Decameron as an authoritative source for explicating Dante’s poem has not been examined at length. For instance, Landino’s commentary is one example of the ways in which 14th- and 15th-century commentators considered the Decameron as the fulfillment of an historical vision of Dante’s chivalric world. 16th-century commentators, on the other hand, who incorporate citations from the Decameron tend to regard Boccaccio’s work as a source for linguistic phenomena. In the 19th century, particularly in the commentary of Longfellow, the Decameron is cited as more than an historical source, with the commentator often inviting intertextual comparisons with the content of the novelle. What are the historical and literary trends by which commentators elaborate Boccaccio’s reinvention of Dante’s world? In my paper I survey these phenomena across the commentary tradition, contextualizing the employment of the Decameron in the commentaries in their own historical terms, while paying close attention to a selection of individual commentaries that widely cite the novelle.

TOWARD 2013, BOCCACCIO’S CENTENARY YEAR

WHAT IS THE AMERICAN BOCCACCIO ASSOCIATION ORGANIZING?

The planning for Boccaccio’s 2013 Centenary is in full swing in the US, England and Italy. The American Boccaccio Association is currently enjoying a hectic but very productive se-ries of activities related to the celebration of the seven-hundredth anniversary of Boccac-cio’s birth. Here below you will find an overview of both the ABA’s initiatives and others in which the ABA’s members will surely be interested.

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce Boccaccio 2013 at Georgetown

University, organized by the ABA and hosted by Georgetown University in Washing-ton, DC. Following the one organized at UMass Amherst in 2010, this is the ABA’s Se-cond Triennial International Boccaccio Conference. We are proud to announce the names of the four keynote speakers who have accepted our invitation:

- Teodolinda Barolini, Lorenzo Da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia Univer-sity

- Carlo Delcorno, Professor at the Università di Bologna and director of Studi sul Boccaccio

- Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Humanities for Italian at Yale Univer-sity

- Elissa Weaver, Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago, and former presi-dent of the American Boccaccio Association.

The conference will open with a banquet at the Italian Embassy in Washington and Professor Carlo Delcorno’s address on Friday, October 4, 2013. It will run through-out the day on Saturday and will conclude with Professor Elissa Weaver’s presenta-tion on Sunday, October 6. The official call for papers will be published in the next newsletter.



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In the United States, The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at SUNY Binghamton will host Boccaccio at 700: Medieval Contexts and Global Intertexts, which will be held April 26-27, 2013. The ongoing call for papers is pre-sented here below. The American Boccaccio Association is sponsoring the presence of one of the keynote speakers, namely Marco Cursi, Professor at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza.”



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Besides these two major conferences dedicated specifically to Boccaccio, the ABA is organizing and/or sponsoring several panels in major American Conferences in order to ensure that Boccaccio’s birthday will be celebrated widely. Upcoming panels include:

The Modern Languages Association in Boston, MA (January 3-6, 2013). “Boccaccio the Humanist” organized and chaired by Michael Papio (U of Massachusetts Amherst)

o Ted Cachey (U of Notre Dame), “Cartographic Boccaccio” o Filippo Andrei (UC Berkeley), “Deified Men and Humanized Gods: Boccaccio’s Genealogies and

the Hermetic Veil of the Fabula” o Lorenzo Dell’Oso (U di Pavia), “Giovanni Boccaccio e il volgarizzamento di Livio”

The 44th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Languages Association Hosted by Tufts University in Boston, MA (March 21-24, 2013). “Boccaccio and His Sources” organized and chaired by Michael Papio (U of Massachusetts Amherst).

In honor of 2013, Boccaccio’s seven-hundredth birthday anniversary, this panel seeks to explore the literary and philosophical influences that lay behind his works, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Though the identification of his sources was once a common endeavor among scholars (e.g., Attilio Hortis, Vittore Branca, A. C. Lee, Giuseppe Billanovich and Giuseppe Velli), this sort of investigation has in many respects been overshadowed in recent years by other sorts of studies that, though often constructed upon the work of such pioneers, tend not to shed additional light on the traditions that contributed substantially to Boccaccio’s intellectual formation. The identification of a source text, especially one that allows us to make previously unnoticed connections and to draw meaningful conclusions, is by no means an outdated scholarly pastime; indeed, the very nature of allusions in medieval texts goes straight to the heart of what fourteenth-century intellectuals understood as the activity of reading, insofar as the auctoritas – whether named or unnamed – was the foundation upon which all future innovation was based. These sources could be newly discovered and significant exam-ples of old standards such as Cicero, Vergil, Dante and Petrarca or the traces of less widely recognized authors. Of interest to this panel is the whole range of Boccaccio’s production, from the narratives of the Decameron, the Fiammetta or the Corbaccio to allegorical commentaries in the Esposizioni or the Genealogie, to his Latin treatises and even the commonly overlooked De montibus.

Send 300-word abstract and brief CV by September 30, 2012 to Michael Papio at [email protected]. As with other submissions to NeMLA, please include with your abstract: your affiliation, email address, postal address, telephone number and A/V requirements if any ($10 han-dling fee with registration). <http://www.nemla.org/convention/2013/cfp.html>

The 2013 Convention of the Renaissance Society of America in San Diego, CA (April 4-6, 2013). Call for papers not yet issued.

The American Association for Italian Studies Conference in Eugene, OR (April 11-14, 2013). Call for papers not yet issued.

The 48th Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (May 9-12, 2013). Call for papers not yet issued.

Additional information about upcoming conferences may be found on the web site of the Casa del Boccaccio: <http://www.casaboccaccio.it/calendario.html>



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FRIENDLY REMINDERS

The ABA newsletter is an invaluable tool for disseminating important information among our members. Please consider sending items of significance, such as notes on work in pro-gress, announcements of general interest and other similar tidbits to Elsa Filosa at [email protected]. Updated information is available between newsletters on the ABA’s web site. Please note that the newsletter will be published on the site only after a six-month lag in order to ensure that the ABA’s members receive the principal benefit of its publication. Christopher Kleinhenz would similarly appreciate your assistance in his yearly compilation of the North American Boccaccio Bibliography. Please send him Boccaccio-related cita-tions so that he may integrate them with his own findings. Email: [email protected]. Dues News!!! If you have not yet paid your annual dues ($25 regular member / and possi-bly an eventual donation for the Lecturae Boccaccii), please send your check, payable to the American Boccaccio Association, to:

Susanna Barsella Dept. of Modern Languages & Literatures Fordham University, Faber Hall 562 441 East Fordham Road Bronx, NY 10458-9993

For your convenience the form is also available on the ABA website: http://www.ABAonline.us/membership.html

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